August 14, 2008

Welcome to Poetry International Web, a worldwide forum for poetry on the internet.

PIW brings you news, essays, interviews and discussion, but, first and foremost, hundreds of poems by acclaimed modern poets from all around the world, both in the original language and in English translation.

In keeping with the spirit of the web, it is a truly international collaboration of at present more than twenty editors in more than twenty different countries – you will find them in the drop-down menu to the left. Each of these countries maintains its own national domain within PIW, with its chosen “Poet(s) of the Quarter”, interviews and other relevant articles.

The Poetry International Foundation in Rotterdam has provided a substantial amount of the poems from its archive, as well as an interesting collection of video material, Camera Poetica. The Defence of Poetry lecture series, given and simultaneously published on-line during the annual Poetry International Festival, invites poets of world-renown to defend their discipline.
We hope that you’ll accept our invitation au voyage, have a long and enjoyable journey, and will bring some new acquaintances home with you.

Gurov is a failed opera singer who lives in Moscow and works in a bank. He dislikes and fears his wife, and is a practised philanderer. Alone in Yalta on vacation, he meets Anna, a young woman. Anna is also alone on vacation, and like Gurov is unhappy with her spouse, whom she considers a flunky. The two begin an affair. The affair lasts longer, and acquires more complexity, than either anticipated.
That, in a nutshell, is "The Lady With The Dog," a 27-page short story written by the Russian author Anton Chekhov in 1899.

Knowing it, do feel any smarter? No? According to researchers at the University of Toronto, that's because you didn't get to read the actual text. Had you done that, they say, your "social intelligence" would have been measurably elevated. In fact, they contend that reading fiction – of any sort – will make you smarter.
"For the first time in history there is now scientific evidence that reading fiction has psychological benefits," writes Keith Oatley in New Scientist.

Oatley is a professor of psychology and the leader of the Toronto team. He is also an award-winning novelist (The Case of Emily V.). On the phone from the University of Toronto, he explains that reading fiction appears to stimulate parts of the brain that govern empathy. "What you're doing when you're reading fiction is you're allowing yourself to become another person for a short period of time ... It loosens up your personality, your rigidities."

Oatley and his team ran a combination of experiments to arrive at this conclusion. First, they assembled a sample group split evenly between people who like and dislike fiction. Both groups took a series of diagnostic tests to determine their social acumen; the fiction readers, they found, demonstrated "substantially greater empathy" than their counterparts. But which came first, the chicken or the egg? Could it be that people who are naturally more socially intelligent gravitate toward fiction, that their affinity for novels is an expression, not a cause, of their talent for empathy?

To answer, the researchers came up with another experiment, this one involving Chekhov. First, researcher Maja Djikic wrote a "control" version of "The Lady With The Dog." Written in a documentary style, it was the same length as the original, described the same events and, crucially, was rated just as interesting by Group A, which read the control version, as Group B's rating of the actual text. Before and after the reading, both groups filled out questionnaires that evaluated their personality traits and emotions.
"We found that people who read the Chekhov story underwent larger changes in personality than those who read the control text – although the types of changes varied from person to person," Oatley wrote in New Scientist. "We think that readers found it easier to identify with the characters in the literary story than in the documentary version. By empathizing with these characters, they became a bit more like them – but each in their own way."
Oatley declined to speculate much further. He pointed out that similar experiments using video games or movies instead of Russian literature could very well produce comparable results. And he freely admitted to the many questions his findings do not resolve.

Will a short story by Chekhov produce the same result as a Tom Clancy airport thriller? In which is one more likely to gather knowledge about people: a pop novel or a literary memoir? And what about a piece of writing that purports to be non-fiction but is actually in large part made up – � la James Frey – or a piece of fiction that is actually a barely concealed recitation of things actual people actually did?